A micromechanical switchable hot spot for SERS applications

Hot spots are defined as nanostructures of noble metal able to locally enhance the electromagnetic field of several orders of magnitude and to confine this effect to a region for several orders of magnitude smaller than the light wavelength. Hot spots are particularly important for the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy applications, in which the field enhancement is used to amplify the usually weak Raman scattering signal. The hot spots are mostly generated between two or more plasmonic nanostructures separated by nanometric gaps. Several strategies are used to design and realize the hot spots, both in solution, using the noble metal nanoparticles, and on surfaces, using nanolithography and evaporation. In this paper, we demonstrated the fabrication of a nanomechanical plasmonic device for Raman spectroscopy, in which the hot spots are switched on when biased at the resonant frequency and switched off when the actuation signal is removed.